TV Guide was once an ode to culture-defining brands—from NBC’s “Must See TV” era of Thursday night hits including “Friends” and “Seinfeld” to HBO’s Sunday night appointment viewing of premium dramas such as “The Sopranos” “and “Game of Thrones.” Viewers not only had favorite shows, but go-to networks.

Now, binge viewing and a deluge of streaming apps, most sporting some shade of blue and a plus sign, have created an entertainment ecosystem marked by consumer confusion, subscription hopping and fractional ratings. As network groups struggle to establish a stable audience (and business model) for their streamers, the importance of branding has never been more pressing.

The developing world of streaming TV has been working to establish a baseline of structure and features, with frustrated viewers witnessing the transition into its next phase in real time. With each rebrand, merger and marketing campaign, the major players seem to be creeping closer to something resembling culturally resonant brands—but ultimately risk crumbling beneath the burden of consumer confusion and fragmentation.

“The streaming landscape is messy and unresolved, and this is causing for consumers quite a bit of confusion about what to watch, where to watch and how much to pay,” said Ross Martin, president of agency Known, which has led marketing campaigns for the likes of Max, Hulu and Netflix, among others. “That in turn is creating mistrust and, ultimately, high churn rates.”

One major hurdle for streamers has been establishing a clear path to profitability, which has resulted in branding being more of an afterthought. The first phase in streaming was a race for subscribers, which shifted after what some now call the Great Netflix Correction of 2022, when the service lost 200,000 subscribers in a single quarter. Now media companies report engagement metrics and average revenue per user, upped by longer watch sessions, to Wall Street.

“The next milestone for each and every one of them is how quickly can they either grow or cut their way to profitability, and branding has never been prioritized in that conversation,” said Martin.

Investment in branding could help bridge the gap between consumer wants and the needs of investors. 

In addition to traditional marketing metrics such as awareness and conversions, more specific consumer behaviors are becoming just as important—how often the user visits the platform, length of time spent, what they choose to watch and how deep they go into similar content afterward, said Shannon Willett, chief marketing officer for Peacock.

Just over half of respondents to an Ad Age-Harris Poll survey said they will subscribe to a streaming service for an individual show and then cancel their subscription after they’ve finished it. The percentage is higher among younger generations—63% of Gen Z respondents said they’ve done so as well as 62% of millennials.

Netflix is one of few streamers that have seemingly established themselves with consumers as a must-have service, in part because of its longevity in the streaming market. A majority of respondents to the Harris Poll survey, 66%, said they were interested in Netflix’s original content among a list of competitors—that percentage rose to 83% among Gen Zers and 74% among millennials. Gen Z’s second preferred streamer for original content was Disney+, with 60% of respondents selecting it, while No. 2 among Millennials was Hulu, at 59%. Averaged across all age groups, Prime Video ranked second with 55% selecting it.

“There’s a minimum-effort bar, which I think all of [the streamers] are hitting, and then a few of them are striving for the next tier. I don’t think anyone is doing a good job; I think all of them are doing what’s expected from a streaming service,” said Daniel Andersson, chief creative officer, North America at IPG-owned branding agency FutureBrand. “To have a successful, future-proofed streaming service, one needs to start to infuse pieces that go beyond the opening screen logo.”

To affinity and beyond

The task of building brand loyalty in streaming has proven challenging as content is layered behind various channel tabs on platforms and across numerous subscriptions. The most recent shakeup in access points is Hulu’s integration into Disney+, which went live this week after a multi-month beta trial (largely to test parental controls). While the two apps still exist separately, subscribers to both through Disney’s bundle of owned streamers will now be able to access Hulu content through a menu in Disney+.

More: Disney+ Super Bowl ad sparked streaming bundle campaign

The move is meant to reduce the number of buttons a consumer has to press in order to view all of Disney’s cross-subscription streaming library, and maximize the amount of interaction the company has with a consumer in a single app. In theory, the integration will allow Disney more opportunities to redirect viewers to different pieces of content across its library, and in the process up ad revenue per user on its ad-supported tier. But it could present cognitive dissonance for followers of the storied Disney brand.

Earlier this month, much laughter was had on social media about the addition of R-rated film “Poor Things” to Disney+ (much of it around an ad for the film’s Disney+ launch in the U.K.; it is now available on the U.S. platform via the Hulu integration).

The Hulu on Disney+ launch campaign took immense effort to retrain consumers’ perceptions of what franchises the Disney brand encompasses. Starting with its Super Bowl spot, Disney+ ads featuring famous lines and character illustrations from its films have been placed in metropolitan markets. With this week’s launch, unexpected faces began to join the fray—“Family Guy” characters disrupt a line from “Lilo and Stitch,” spooky imagery from “American Horror Story” surrounds the magic Cinderella phrase “bibbidi-bobbidi-boo” and “the bare necessities” morphed into FX’s series “The Bear.”

The meme-ification of “Poor Things” protagonist Bella Baxter as a Disney princess points to a larger challenge in branding a streaming service. Several network groups’ streamers have pegged their names on the parent company of the channels they house, which has meant frankensteining some semblance of a unified identity across channels originally meant to serve different audiences. This has also posed a learning curve for consumers who may not be aware of the corporate ownership of MTV, ABC, Bravo and other linear channels. 

In contrast to Hulu’s Disney-ification, Warner Bros. Discovery chose to drop the well-known HBO name from its streamer HBO Max to represent the wealth of non-HBO content the app hosts. At the time of the Max rebrand, the streamer’s chief marketing officer, Patrizio Spagnoletto, told Ad Age that internal data had revealed HBO’s audience within HBO Max were the most prominent in the streamer, but that prospective subscribers were at an impasse associating the platform with the cable channel’s style of content.

Although many wondered whether or not Max had built enough brand equity in itself to stand alone, Spagnoletto said, “There is a ton of equity that is built in HBO. We think we are able now to attract bigger audiences for premium content without sacrificing and, more importantly, preserving and privileging the HBO brand.” 

A Warner Bros. Discovery spokesperson declined to comment on the current state of the platform rebrand. 

For the launch of Paramount+, Paramount swapped the streamer’s previous name, CBS All Access, for that of the company’s legendary film studio because it was already associated with a breadth of content genres, said Domenic DiMeglio, chief marketing officer and chief data officer at Paramount Streaming. While consumer perception of the Paramount brand would need to expand to encompass sports and news content, Paramount+ “felt like it could be the big tent brand which all of our brands and franchises could live within.”

And Paramount+’s brand marketing has pointed out as much: its long-running “Mountain of Entertainment” campaign brings levity to the idea that characters and personalities from “Star Trek,” “Survivor,” “Dora the Explorer,” “The Drew Barrymore Show” and the NFL, among others, can all live within one brand.

The task of streamlining a house of brands into a single identity is not impossible. FutureBrand’s Andersson likened the job facing the network streamers to that of luxury brand holding companies, such as LVMH, parent of Louis Vuitton, Hennessy and Tag Heuer, among others, which have developed reputations among consumers beyond the brands they represent. 

While the massive roster of LVMH brands each has its own identity, the parent company has established values around sustainability and craftsmanship that trickle down to its individual houses, which take their own approaches to those topics as well, said Andersson. Expressing and marketing core values ensures “it doesn’t feel like just a random collection of brands being hodgepodged together,” said Andersson. 

“Being able to define an overarching point of view and the role of each of the brands in a portfolio and what they deliver very clearly” is a necessity to branding a collection of channels, added Andersson. Historically, cable providers offering numerous channels found success in positioning themselves as necessities or barriers to entry for entertainment, and consumers have been quick to celebrate the departure from cable bundles.

Andersson listed Peacock as an example of smart branding in streaming, with its name “taking the equities of the owner brand and translating it into something that has its own story.”

Rather than focusing on individual users, Peacock’s Willett said the streamer makes sense of its collection of brands by curating moments for every member of a household. For example, Peacock’s exclusive NFL playoff game in January, which broke streaming records with an average audience of 23 million, was paired with the premiere of scripted comedy series “Ted” and reality competition series “The Traitors.” During February, “Ted” and “The Traitors” combined generated 1.3 billion minutes of viewing, according to Nielsen.

While the game day broke records for live viewership on the platform, the following day generated the most on-demand viewing across Peacock’s library since its launch, according to an NBCUniversal spokesperson.

“We don’t have to be just one thing to everyone,” said Willett. “We can be the home for their fandom, whatever that might be, and they just need to know that their stuff is with us.”

Blank space

As the leading streamers have developed their offerings, most have opted to advertise around value propositions with rhetoric indicating they offer something for everyone. But efforts to woo mass-market audiences overlook opportunities to brand around individual fan communities and niches. 

“Saying you’re the best streamer is not an identity. Saying you have the most stuff is not an identity. Saying that you're the best value is not an identity,” said Known’s Martin. “All early markets compete on selling features, and in this case, the features are the content. That’s not going to be enough anymore because everything is everywhere.”

Martin likened the idea to Comedy Central, which had a strong brand identity for being funny and irreverent and was also able to use hit shows such as “South Park” as calling cards for its network.

“Today, if you asked a more recent ‘South Park’ fan who made ‘South Park,’ you’re not going to hear Comedy Central. In fact, I don’t even know if they would know how to find Comedy Central, or find ‘South Park’ on Comedy Central.”

But content discovery is a different game in the world of streaming than it is for linear TV, where channel surfing and passive viewing serve as strong marketing tools. According to the Ad Age-Harris Poll survey, methods of finding content in streaming are vastly different by generation. Social media is the content recommendation source of choice for the majority of Gen Z (71%) and millennial respondents (55%). And 67% of all respondents said they just search for individual streaming titles they want to watch on their air dates.

“Entertainment marketers have been slow to adopt some of the more sophisticated marketing tools available to all marketers,” said Martin. “As a result, there is more waste in entertainment marketing than perhaps any other category. All of the tools that we now have at our disposal as marketers make us more predictive and more precise, which means we can be more efficient and more effective. That is nowhere near the reality of today in entertainment marketing.”

Series and movie trailers are typically served to mass audiences to generate broad interest and word-of-mouth hype. Streaming marketers, said Martin, need to do more work in audience targeting to identify consumers who are diehards for certain genres and to establish their platforms as the destination for that genre.

Paramount’s DiMeglio said it takes a balance of single-title and platform marketing to be effective.

“You’ve got to do the service sell to showcase the breadth and depth [of content] that gives viewers the notion of the value that they’re going to get because people will sign up for one show, but by and large, they want to sign up for that one show knowing there’s a whole bunch of other stuff that they can watch,” said DiMeglio.

Paramount+ has measures in place to align content of similar tastes, said DiMeglio. For example, users signing in once a week to watch “Halo,” its series based on the video game of the same name, will likely be prompted to stay on the platform to watch episodes of “Star Trek” or other science fiction content.

Similarly, Peacock’s Willett said Bravo watchers will receive different recommendations and ads during episodes of the “Real Housewives” franchise than “Law & Order” viewers, and this user targeting extends to emails and push notifications from the platform. 

Taking this type of targeted marketing outside of the recommendations made within the platform is less common. Numerous opportunities await for top streamers to set up shop as the go-to pipeline for consistent original content, said Martin, who listed kids entertainment, sports and live TV as areas where no single streamer can claim dominance.

Outside the realm of top mass-market subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) streamers, certain niche platforms have converged diehard fandoms around their services.

Crunchyroll, a subscription service for anime, is a large presence at fan conventions and hosts a store for print anime to supplement its platform’s video content. Shudder, the horror streamer owned by AMC Networks, shows up at the fan conventions for its subject matter, hosts live viewing events for episodes of its cult-following series “The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs” and runs an annual marketing stunt that allows fans to call in to the streamer’s content curator for film recommendations during Halloween season.

Meanwhile, FAST service Tubi, which markets as a mass-interest service with content for all preferences, recently rebranded and announced a slate of curated content for an uptick in Gen Z users.

Reward good behavior

Streamers also have done little to reward subscribers for maintaining their relationships, said Martin. Rewards can look like many things beyond classic buy more, get points loyalty programs.

Outside of the TV space, Spotify has found immense success through its annual Wrapped campaign. Wrapped is a custom asset delivered to each subscriber that documents their listening hours, top songs, artists and genres for the year. It has become a cultural event to share one’s Wrapped on social media; other music platforms have tried to mimic the event, much to the mockery of Spotify users. 

Read more about Spotify Wrapped marketing

“People really look forward to that and create an emotional bond with the brand, and [TV] streaming services have a long way to go to start building that connection with consumers,” Andersson said of Spotify Wrapped. “There’s much more that can be done in building the universe that goes beyond just the screen and the streaming service itself.”

At a larger scale, Netflix has announced intentions to launch in-person venues called Netflix House. These permanent installations are set to have rotating experiences based on the streamer’s IP, including dining, shopping and live experiences.

While Netflix’s shops and shows are an extension of its streaming brand, Disney+ has been built as a repository for the franchises fans are already loyal to. Of course, the Disney ecosystem, including its parks, is a formidable marketing tool for the streamer, but “what else can I unlock once I’m in the universe of the streaming service?” said Andersson. “There’s this outside-in thinking, but thinking inside-out is where brands need to really [dig in].”

Known’s Martin said streamers are on the precipice of “phase two,” in which the marketing will need to transition from establishing baselines to developing relationships and loyalties with consumers—or they’ll risk being left behind in the rapidly shifting and condensing media landscape.

“This is no longer an awareness game,” said Martin. “We all know what streamers we have to choose from, but audiences are struggling mightily to understand the differences between them. That’s where brand comes in, and there’s enormous opportunity.”